Devanshu Bansal | Source | Co-Founder at The X Future

What can spook a CFO this season? 👻

Risk of being labeled as a fraud!

Manual accounting is highly correlated to financial statement integrity risk and elevates the chance of fraud.

In a recent Blackline survey nearly 70% of leaders said they’d made a significant business decision based on inaccurate financials. In the same survey 55% of respondents shared that they aren’t entirely confident they can identify financial errors before reporting results.

Even worse, just 38% of finance professionals—those who are closest to the process—said they trusted the numbers.

All these problems lead to a single root cause which is human error.

It is high time that CFOs explore and adopt tools that can automate mundane and prone to human error work, and unlock the investment they have made in their workforce.

3 mindset shifts needed in CFOs to achieve Autonomous Finance 🤔

According to a Gartner survey 60% of CFOs ranked “mindset” in the top 2 barriers to achieving autonomous finance 😣

CFOs must acknowledge and overcome the three ways in which their mindsets are wired against the technologies that will enable autonomous finance :

• Believing finance should start small to avoid costly failures with technology investments
• Believing finance should use technology as a tool but rely on people to make decisions
• Believing their teams will embrace technology only when they see its benefits

Instead CFOs need to approach these points as:

- We have to experiment broadly to realize value from technologies for autonomous finance.
- We need to give technologies for autonomous finance as much credit as we give people.
- My team’s behavior toward technologies for autonomous finance will change when my behavior changes.

Confronting the way CFOs’ mindsets are wired against technology is the hardest barrier to overcome in the journey toward autonomous finance. Successful CFOs will embrace broad experimentation with technologies from the outset, build credibility in technologies and recognize that personal behavior change is the best way to encourage employee behavior change toward technologies for autonomous finance.

After talking to 45 CFOs over the past 2 months this has stood out to be one of the biggest problem they are looking to solve.

With the increasing global business uncertainty, how can we be better prepared?

This problem has a multifaceted solution but one key part of that solution is What-If scenario planning.

Companies have been doing scenario analysis using excels since decades but that doesn't solve the problem. The broader the use of spreadsheets within an organization, the greater the chance for human error and risk. Too often, spreadsheets create flawed models and inaccurate calculations due to a lack of standardization, poor data integrity and ineffective collaboration methods.

What the current situation demands is an automated key planning processing tool that connects financial and operational data from across the business and leverages machine learning applied across end-to-end analytical workflows and an intuitive user experience to bring finance and operational teams together with at-a-glance visuals of key company KPIs.

This will enable them to source meaningful insights through timely analysis and to drive agile planning decisions that deliver business value in the pursuit of sustained growth.